[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Squid Game - Season 2" Episode 2

Credit given where it's due, "Squid Game - Season 2" at least seems to appreciate just how incoherent its premise is. How exactly is Gi-hun supposed to destroy the game? He hires a bunch of thugs to, what? Shoot the people running it? The Front Man, or In-ho, Joon-ho's brother, played by Lee Byung-hun, is still a voice only character, but spends most of his screentime pointing out that whatever Gi-hun is trying to do, it can't possibly work.

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It's probably not much of a spoiler to say that Gi-hun participates in the game again, given that he's literally seen wearing one of those uniforms on the theatrical poster. The second episode does have a pretty good twist regarding No-eul (played by Park Gyu-young) that's sortof spoiled if you look at the cast list, so I would recommend not doing that. The cryptic version is that the story's making a fairly serious attempt to look at how the games work from every possible angle.

But it's also tied a lot to the preexisting continuity. It's not really important to know who Sang-woo and Sae-byeok are except to the extent that they're people whose deaths in the first season make Gi-hun feel guilty. I was a bit surprised, incidentally, that "Squid Game - Season 2" is using the North Korean defector angle again, just in a much less subtle way. I was left wondering whether writer/director Hwang Dong-hyuk took comments about "Squid Game" by North Korean media about how the show demonstrates the decadence of South Korean culture a little personally.

It's also a little late. "Squid Game - Season 2" seems to be moving at exactly half the speed that "Squid Game" did, which tracks given that Hwang Dong-hyuk claimed the only reason the show is two seasons was because he needed that many to finish the idea he came up with. Nothing that's happened so far is filler. If anything, it's a bit surprising just how little we know about the new characters, even if they're certain to show up in third episode.

"Squid Game - Season 2" is relying a lot on the goodwill of the first season to maintain viewer interest despite the lack of any especially flashy setpieces in these first two episodes. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a little odd that not very much has actually happened so far. The climaxes aren't really violent so much as they are strangely philosophical, as if the characters are functioning as their own Greek chorus.

Written by William Schwartz